If you haven’t caught this story, which set the right-side blogosphere aflame yesterday, here it is in a nutshell. Ifill is an alleged journalist who is scheduled to moderate tonight’s VP debate. She has a book coming out touting an “Age of Obama”, which gives her a decided financial interest in the outcome of the election. Michelle Malkin has a very good column on Ifill’s conflict of interest and the naked bias she’s displayed as she’s gone about her “objective” journalist duties.

There are a lot of side-stories here that are clouding the issue. Greta van Susteren (via memeorandum) found out that the McCain campaign had no idea that she was writing the book. Michael Calderone pooh-poohs that story and says that the campaign should have known. PBS shrugs it off and McCain himself pours golden honey of praise all over Ifill, the way he does.

As it happens, Ifill lied about it anyhow. She never told the debate commission about her book so it ahd no chance to decide if her financial stake in the outcome of the debate might disqualify her or not.

She’s a jerk and she should have quit the debate a long time ago. She knows full well that her book project puts her in an obvious conflict of interest situation and that not even the most sainted human being can avoid the appearance of impropriety. If she cared one whit for her professional reputation, she would avoid any semblance of a conflict so that when she gets back to her day job, she’ll still have the public’s trust.

My guess is that she has no intention of working for PBS after January, 2009. I think she fully expects to have a job in the Obama administration somewhere. I think that if he wins in November, you’ll see her name very high on the list to be Press Secretary.

So she’s not much interested in what the public thinks about her objectivity. She has book royalties to earn and a job for which to interview and it so happens that one of her employers will be right up on stage in front of her.

By the way, if this post sounds like I’m impugning her character, that’s because I am. It’s obvious that if she had any integrity at all, she would have been open and honest about her book and would have stepped down from the debate. What’s more, she wouldn’t have done any campaign reporting this election. It’s not that she’s specifically flawed; she’s merely human. How in the world can you expect anyone to keep their objectivity when they have so much personally at stake? You can’t put someone that close to regular temptation and expect them to remain unsullied. Human nature just doesn’t work that way.

Of course, if the journalistic profession had any institutional integrity, PBS would have pulled her off political assignments already and her fellow journalists would have demanded, for their sakes if not hers, that she not moderate the debate tonight. But the MSM are in much the same situation as she. If Obama doesn’t win, then they’ve burned a lot of bridges with the American public. They need him in the White House to protect them the way they’ve protected him in this campaign.

So it’s up to us. You can bet that I will be watching Ifill like a hawk tonight. I’m going to attribute every single slip to malice and assume that she will be doing her very best to make Joe Biden look good and Sarah Palin bad. I recommend that you do the same. She’s given us no choice at this point. She’s been very clear that she intends to make a lot of money off an Obama presidency. I see no reason to believe that she won’t do what she needs to do to make that happen and I don’t think you should either.